


The Flame

by proprioception (sacrificethemtothesquid)



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-18 19:18:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13688088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sacrificethemtothesquid/pseuds/proprioception
Summary: She thinks that if this is what it means to be Anointed, that if Anointed can be the word for the way he looks at her, she’d gladly be Anointed for a thousand years.One-shot, set during the battle for the Spire. Same universe asThe Moth.





	The Flame

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Valentine's Day, lovelies. This is just a teeny little token of my undying affection.

She’s trying to move, trying to _run_ , but nothing responds. She’s an overdrawn bow, a string stretched beyond use. She’s a spear splintered in its core.

The city is in ruins and there’s not even enough left of the village to describe the destruction. She stumbles over corpses both man and machine, the miasma swirling around her more ash than air. Everyone here is dead, and distantly, she wonders who will repopulate the world if she succeeds. GAIA is gone. The Cradle facility is broken and empty.

 _Elisabet didn’t give up,_ she repeats. _Elisabet had no air. Elisabet had no heat. The world was already dead, but she didn’t give up. If she could do it, so can I._

She can't give up. She was _made_ for this. This is the solepurpose of her existence, and if she fails, the entire world will fall. There won’t be another Elisabet clone. There won’t be _anything_.

She has to keep moving. 

The stairs up the butte are shattered, whole sections cleaved from the stone. Her body is an impossible weight, her arms thin saplings quivering in the wind. It would be a hard climb even on a good day, but her lungs are clogged with smoke, darkness still clinging to the edge of her vision. Her head echoes like the belly of a drum, low and hollow. Her ancient armor sizzles quietly, stray current gnawing at a muscle in her back. She's unprotected, no shield except for her own fragile skin. 

_If she could do it, so can I._

For so many years, she’s loved to free-climb. She’s swung from stone to stone, relishing the dizzying distance to the ground and the exhilarating terror of leaping to a hand-hold she doesn’t know for certain will catch her.

Now, she climbs like she did when she was barely taller than the grass. Every movement screams with effort. She puts one hand up, then the other, and if she looks down, she’s going to let go. The world will end, and the Faro swarm will consume her body as she lies broken on the ground below. She wonders if it would be like burning, the steady lick of flame, or if it would feel more like ants, one tiny, excruciating bite after another.

_If she could do it, so can I._

Hand over hand. Crawl to this ledge. Don't stop to rest - there's no time. Legs. Arms. Reach for that crack. Left hand. Fingers gripping broken stone, slick and bleeding from the effort.  

She doesn’t realize she’s at the top until she heaves herself over a boulder and then there _he_ is.

He’s alive. He’s _alive_.

There’s blood everywhere - so much blood, too much blood, and her heart is such fierce, painful knot in her chest - but he reaches for her like he’s drowning. He’s solid in her arms, his entire body shaking and wrapped tightly around hers. She presses her face to his neck and gasps into his scarf.

It feels like first clean breath she’s had in her entire life.

Suddenly, she’s not alone.

 

****

 

No one has ever been this glad to see her, and he’s glad because she’s _Aloy_. He’s never thought of her as outcast or anointed. She isn't the motherless clone of an ancient scientist. She's just a person, a pretty girl from the middle of nowhere. 

He isn’t whole. He limps on himself like his soul is a collection of poorly-set bones. He laughs and blusters and drinks, but when she talks, he follows every word with hungry ears. He wears his own skin like it belongs to someone else, but when he sees her, he lights up with a burning intensity that sears her to her marrow.

He looks at her like she’s the sun. There's blood and ash ground into his skin, but his eyes are two points of bright, perfect blue.

“We were just about to go over the top,” he says hoarsely, and pushes her toward the stairs. “I'm right behind you.”

In the fighting that follows, there's a bare heartbeat, and she sees him through the smoke. He staggers up from a hit that would have killed any other man to strike an earth-shattering blow against a Sawtooth.

It's not until he turns to _grin_ at her that she realizes that until this exact moment, she hasn’t known how badly she needs him.

 

****

 

“Let me do it,” he gasps, his hand clutching at her arm. “Tell me what I can do. Tell me where-“

Another rocket explodes right above them, and she’s buried under the weight of his body amid a spray of smoke and stone.

Sometimes, she wishes they’d met somewhere else. Maybe in a different life, he’d be someone she could come to love. She wants to tell him that. She wants him to look at her like he’d looked at her in Brightmarket, entranced and enthralled. She wants him to look at her the way he's looking at her right now, as if she's something infinite and precious.

She thinks that if this is what it means to be Anointed, that if Anointed can be the word for the way he looks at her, she’d gladly be Anointed for a thousand years.

No one’s ever looked at her this way, and he _keeps_ doing it. There’s no pressure in his gaze, no expectation. If she were someone else, if she were anyone other than who she is, she’d let him reel her in. She’d fall into the earnest blue of his eyes like rising up into the sky, and maybe she’d even find out what it feels like to touch him.

He held her down in Brightmarket. The day is mostly a haze of furious pain, but she remembers his arms hard and steady around her. He doesn’t hesitate when she needs him. His spine goes straight and his eyes focus, and he doesn’t even think. All trepidation disappears and he just _moves._

Like right now. He’s made himself a shelter, letting his armor protect them both. He’s got her pulled against his chest, and he doesn’t even _flinch_ as the rockets explode around them.

She’s going to die today. That’s something she’s accepted with grim certainty, just like Elisabet accepted her death after sealing the pressure doors, but Erend is going to die right with her - he’s going to die _for_ her - and by the Goddess, she doesn’t want that. He’s good. He’s pure. He’s a good man who doesn’t see his own worth, and she absolutely needs him to live through this.

He won’t. Neither of them will.

She’s never thought it would be him here with her at the end. She’s Anointed of the Nora and Elisabet Sobek whether she likes those things or not, and there’s no way out. Erend isn’t here for the Anointed, and he isn’t here for Elisabet. He’s here for _her_. He's had the option to run, and he hasn't. He never does. 

In the small corners of her mind, she’d thought - well, not even thought, maybe not even _hoped_ \- that the Mothers would join her with Varl. She trusts Varl as much as she’s trusted anyone. Vala died for her, and Varl - well, he’s the closest to Vala that she can have. He’s helped her and she’s helped him, and she’d sort of assumed that’s how these things go.  

Now, Varl is somewhere across the battlefield. He’s fighting on her behalf, but he’s not fighting for _her_. It shouldn’t feel like a betrayal, but it does. Until his sneer at the Spire, he’d seemed to care the least for Nora traditions, but in the end, he’s as Nora as everyone else.

Erend has never sneered. Not once. He’s angry with the Nora, but he’s never degraded her relationship with them. He’s told her she didn’t belong, but he hasn’t once demanded that she renounce her tribe. He states what he thinks, but he doesn’t heap his judgement on her to untangle.

 _The pretty girl from the middle of nowhere_.

She’d hated that. She’d been so affronted. Rost told her these things might happen, but she hadn’t had any idea, not really. Erend had leaned in way too close, ale heavy on his breath, but he’d grinned and flirted without obvious expectation of anything else. In Meridian, he’d been a hard clot of desperate grief, and she almost hadn’t recognized the big, blustering Oseram soldier from Mother’s Heart in the shadow-eyed ruin swaying before her.

She’d wanted that Oseram soldier back. She’d needed something solid and steady. Death clung to her like hard frost despite the jungle’s stifling heat, and she’d needed information on Olin like she’d needed air in her lungs. Blood on her hands wouldn’t clean the blood already there, but it might have _helped._

He’d gone after her in Pitchcliff. She’d woken up in his bed, his face miserable and close. She’d already mostly accepted that she was alone, but then he was there despite his pain, as if following her were the most obvious thing in the world.

It wasn’t obvious. It wasn’t obvious then and it’s still not obvious now, but here he is. She thinks that maybe she wants to get used to this, the weight of his gaze and the weight of his body.

She wishes there was more time.

 

****

 

Two minutes. It’s become a litany. They say it to each other beyond reason. She’s Elisabet Sobek and she’s going to die to save the world all over again, but maybe, just _maybe_ , she’ll be Aloy. Maybe she’ll survive, and she’ll get to spend two minutes with this man fighting beside her.

She wants that. She hasn't known until right now. She wants it more than she wants to breathe.

“Two minutes,” he reminds her.

There isn’t enough room in her heart for this moment, and when he crouches to let her launch herself off his shoulder, she thinks wildly that no one else has ever given themselves so completely to her cause.

Except...this isn’t to her cause. It’s to  _her_. He’s made that abundantly clear. If her cause was to swim across the Daybrink in heavy armor, he’d be the first off the dock. He’s never questioned how she knows what she knows. He’s never questioned where she goes or what she does. He’s asked because he’s wanted to help. He’s asked because he _worries_. He doesn’t seem to care about the fate of the world. He only wants to know that _she_ is okay, and that’s more than anyone else has ever done.

“When this is over,” he says, as if there’s any chance they’ll be standing at the end. Amid the ash and blood on his face, two perfect, clean stripes run down from reddened eyes. He’s focused on her, staring at nothing but her. For this brief second, she’s the only thing he can see, and the intensity is terrifying.

She thinks it might be the first time anyone has ever cried for her.

 

****

 

Later, she’ll limp across a bridge after days of desperation, and she’ll clutch his shaking fingers in her own. For now, she drops her head against him, savoring the warmth of his body and the tang of his sweat. The sky is as blue as his eyes, and somehow, both he and the world are still alive. She’s done what she was born to do. Her task is complete. She doesn’t have to be Elisabet Sobek. She doesn’t have to be the Anointed of the Nora.

She’s just Aloy now, and she can gladly give him every minute he wants.


End file.
